The HealthCare.gov website has had problems with delays and dropped information. / Lynne Sladky, AP

by Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY

by Kelly Kennedy, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON - Not enough tests were performed on the HealthCare.gov website by the government and its contractors before the site was launched Oct. 1, a Department of Health and Human Services official said Thursday.

"The system just wasn't tested enough," said Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is in charge of the site. "We all know we were working under a compressed time frame to launch this on Oct. 1."

Her remarks came after contractors testified at a hearing Thursday morning that they had just two weeks to test the site before all the pieces from several contractors had to work together the day of the launch. The House Energy and Commerce Committee conducted the hearing to find out why the problems had not been resolved before the site went live.

The site is getting better, Bataille said. The department has added bandwidth to cope with the high demand and is performing more and improved testing before adding elements. It also has improved the application section of the site, where many consumers were experiencing delays. Hardware is being added, Bataille said, and "bugs" are being fixed as they occur.

"We know the experience on HealthCare.gov has been frustrating," Bataille said.

Determining many of the problems the system would have after the various parts were integrated was difficult until the site actually went online, Bataille said. It was the agency's responsibility to make sure all the parts worked together.

Other changes to the site this week, Bataille said, include improvements in the data hub, which determines what kinds of subsidies or Medicaid people are eligible for on both the federal and the state exchanges. Applications there, she said, are processed within "a second."

About 700,000 applications have been submitted across the nation, which means people have received their eligibility determinations and may shop for insurance and enroll in a plan.

The application process still has some bugs, she said, such as error messages, pages going blank or things freezing.

"Those are the kinds of things we are prioritizing," Bataille said.

She said 1.6 million people have called the call center, where they may apply, and they wait for help for less than a minute.

During the House hearing, contractors said CMS decided at the last minute not to allow people to shop for plans before learning what kinds of tax credits they might receive.

Bataille called that a "business decision" because CMS needed to prioritize the ability to launch, verify eligibility and enroll in a plan.

"We are seeing many more consumers successfully creating their accounts and moving on," she said.

She, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and President Obama have said people can sign up by phone, paper or in person to avoid the website problems.

And Sebelius wrote a blog Thursday again encouraging people to use other means to enroll if they couldn't get through on HealthCare.gov.

"At the Call Center, we've had over 1.6 million calls," she said. "When the President spoke on Monday, we handled over 120,000 calls over the day, our second highest day so far. And average wait times for calls is less than 30 seconds, and 3 minutes for chats."

But Jonathan Wu, CEO and chief analyst for ValuePenguin.com, which analyzes data about health care and health care reform, said no one will avoid HealthCare.gov entirely.

After talking with people at the call centers, as well as the navigators helping people through the process of enrollment, Wu said the information still must be entered at HealthCare.gov.

"What we're understanding now is the computer system that runs the website is essentially the only way to finish an application," Wu said. "If you call the call center, a lot of times they fill out the paper application because they can't get to the online application. So they're doing the same thing as you are and having the same issues."

Wu said he began wondering about the problem Monday when Obama said it was just a website issue. Wu said his researchers were finding problems at the call centers on the day of the launch.

"That shouldn't have been the response - that they were having problems - if it was just a problem for the website," he said. "But they have to use the website, too."

In other words, "It's not necessarily any faster or better to go through those systems," Wu said.

Originally, the call centers and Web chat were set up to help people through the process, or to help people apply who do not have access to the Internet. HHS did not deny the charge, but said instead that people could complete the process "from beginning to end" over the phone.

"However, when call volume is high, or when the application is unable to be processed online, call center representatives will help to fill out an application and the consumer will be contacted at a later time to move forward with shopping and enrolling in a plan," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said.

Sumit Nijhawan, the CEO of Infogix, said he sees yet another issue that was touched upon in the hearing Wednesday: The insurers say they're getting bad information from the federal exchange. He works with the plans to make sure information they collect internally from customers is correct.

"A lot of what we are seeing is not great data being sent from the marketplaces to the plans," Nijhawan said. "The problem is more that you have a lot of data flying around to a lot of different entities. When you have something on this scale with this much data, issues are bound to happen."

That includes duplicate applications, incorrect names or husbands being listed as independent children.

Within the insurance industry, he said, there are controls that allow administrators to track each application and what it contains - he described it as similar to a FedEx package. That way, they can tell consumers where in the process they are, as well as if the information is correct.

Now, each stalled application in the exchange is being tracked back individually, which takes time. Nijhawan said that as more people apply, it will become almost impossible to keep track of which ones are stuck without a monitoring system.

"What I'd really like to see happen is that end-to-end monitoring," Nijhawan said. "The technology is there to do that. It just requires foresight."